Incognito (38 page)

35
See Weiskrantz, “Outlooks” and
Blindsight
.

36
Technically, reptiles don’t see much outside of the immediate reach of their tongues, unless something is moving wildly. So if you’re resting on a lounge chair ten feet away from a lizard, you most likely don’t exist to him.

37
See, for example, Crick and Koch, “The unconscious homunculus,” for use of the term
zombie systems
.

38
A recent finding shows that the Stroop effect can disappear following posthypnotic suggestion. Amir Raz and his colleagues selected a pool of hypnotizable subjects using a completely independent test battery. Under hypnosis, subjects were told that in a later task, they would attend to only ink color. Under these conditions, when the subjects were tested, the Stroop interference essentially vanished. Hypnosis is not a phenomenon that is well understood at the level of the nervous system; nor is it understood why some subjects are more hypnotizable than others, and what exactly the role of attention, or of reward patterns, might be in explaining the effects. Nevertheless, the data raise intriguing questions about conflict reduction between internal variables, such as a desire to run versus a desire to stay and fight. See Raz, Shapiro, Fan, and Posner, “Hypnotic suggestion.”

39
Bem, “Self-perception theory”; Eagleman, “The where and when of intention.”

40
Gazzaniga, “The split-brain revisited.”

41
Eagleman, Person, and Montague, “A computational role for dopamine.” In this paper we constructed a model based on the reward systems in the brain, and ran this model on the same computer game. Astoundingly, the simple model captured the important features of the human strategies, which suggested that people’s choices were being driven by surprisingly simple underlying mechanisms.

42
M. Shermer, “Patternicity: Finding meaningful patterns in meaningless noise,”
Scientific American
, December 2008.

43
For simplicity, I’ve related the random-activity hypothesis of dream content, known technically as the activation-synthesis model (Hobson and McCarley, “The brain as a dream state generator”). In fact, there are many theories of dreaming. Freud suggested that dreams are a disguised attempt at wish fulfillment; however, this may be unlikely in the face of, say, the repetitive dreams of post-traumatic stress disorder. Later, in the 1970s, Jung proposed that dreams are compensating for aspects of the personality neglected in waking life. The problem here is that the themes of dreams seem to be the same everywhere, across cultures and generations—themes such as being lost, preparing meals, or being late for an examination—and it’s a bit difficult to explain what these things have to do with personality neglect. In general, however, I would like to emphasize that despite the popularity of the activation-synthesis hypothesis in neurobiology circles, there is much about dream content that remains deeply unexplained.

44
Crick and Koch, “Constraints.”

45
Tinbergen. “Derived activities.”

46
Kelly,
The Psychology of Secrets
.

47
Pennebaker, “Traumatic experience”

48
Petrie, Booth, and Pennebaker, “The immunological effects.”

49
To be clear, the team-of-rivals framework, by itself, doesn’t solve the whole AI problem. The next difficulty is in learning how to control the subparts, how to dynamically allocate control to expert subsystems, how to arbitrate battles, how to update the system on the basis of recent successes and failures, how to develop a meta-knowledge of how the parts will act when confronted with temptations in the near future, and so on. Our frontal lobes have developed over millions of years using biology’s finest tricks, and we still have not teased out the riddles of their circuitry. Nonetheless, understanding the correct architecture from the get-go is our best way forward.

  
1
Lavergne,
A Sniper in the Tower
.

  
2
Report to Governor, Charles J. Whitman Catastrophe, Medical Aspects, September 8, 1966.

  
3
S. Brown, and E. Shafer, “An Investigation into the functions of the occipital and temporal lobes of the monkey’s brain,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences
179 (1888): 303–27.

  
4
Klüver and Bucy, “Preliminary analysis” This constellation of symptoms, usually accompanied by hypersexuality and hyperorality, is known as Klüver-Bucy syndrome.

  
5
K. Bucher, R. Myers, and C. Southwick, “Anterior temporal cortex and maternal behaviour in monkey,”
Neurology
20 (1970): 415.

  
6
Burns and Swerdlow, “Right orbitofrontal tumor.”

  
7
Mendez, et al., “Psychiatric symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s disease”; Mendez, et al., “Acquired sociopathy and frontotemporal dementia.”

  
8
M. Leann Dodd, Kevin J. Klos, James H. Bower, Yonas E. Geda, Keith A. Josephs, and J. Eric Ahlskog, “Pathological gambling caused by drugs used to treat Parkinson disease,”
Archives of Neurology
62, no. 9 (2005): 1377–81.

  
9
For a solid foundation and clear exposition of the reward systems, see Montague,
Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect.

10
Rutter, “Environmentally mediated risks”; Caspi and Moffitt, “Gene–environment interactions.”

11
The guilty mind is known as
mens rea
. If you commit the guilty act (
actus reus
) but did not provably have
mens rea
, you are not culpable.

12
Broughton, et al., “Homicidal somnambulism.”

13
As of this writing, there have been sixty-eight cases of homicidal somnambulism in North American and European courts, the first one recorded in the 1600s. While we can assume that some fraction of these cases are dishonest pleas, not all of them are. These same considerations of parasomnias have come into courtrooms more recently with sleep sex—for example, rape or infidelity while sleeping—and several cases have been acquitted on these grounds.

14
Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl, “Time”; Haggard and Eimer, “On the relation”; Kornhuber and Deecke, “Changes”; Eagleman, “The where and when of intention”; Eagleman and Holcombe, “Causality”; Soon, et al., “Unconscious determinants of free decisions.”

15
Not everyone agrees that Libet’s simple test constitutes a meaningful
test of free will. As Paul McHugh points out, “What else would one expect when studying a capricious act with neither consequence nor significance to the actor?”

16
Remember, criminal behavior is not entirely about the actor’s genes alone. Diabetes and lung disease are influenced by high-sugar foods and elevated air pollution, as well as a genetic predisposition. In the same way, biology and the external environment interact in criminality.

17
Bingham, Preface.

18
See Eagleman and Downar,
Cognitive Neuroscience
.

19
Eadie and Bladin,
A Disease Once Sacred
.

20
Sapolsky, “The frontal cortex.”

21
Scarpa and Raine, “The psychophysiology,” and Kiehl, “A cognitive neuroscience perspective on psychopathy.”

22
Sapolsky, “The frontal cortex.”

23
Singer, “Keiner kann anders, als er ist.”

24
Note that “abnormal” is meant only in a statistical sense—that is, not the normal way of behaving. The fact that most people behave a certain way is mute on whether that action is correct in a larger moral sense. It is only a statement about the local laws, customs, and mores of a group of people at a particular time—exactly the same loose constraints by which the “crime” is always defined.

25
See Monahan, “A jurisprudence,” or Denno, “Consciousness.”

26
A challenge for biological explanations of behavior is that people on the left and right will push their own agendas. See Laland and Brown,
Sense and Nonsense
, as well as O’Hara, “How neuroscience might advance the law.” Appropriate caution is of tantamount importance, because biological stories about human behavior have been misused in the past to support agendas. However, past misuse does not mean the biological studies should be abandoned; it only implies that they should be improved.

27
See, for example, Bezdjian, Raine, Baker, and Lynam, “Psychopathic personality,” or Raine,
The Psychopathology of Crime
.

28
Note that the lobotomy was considered a successful procedure for noncriminal patients in large part because of the glowing reports of the families. It wasn’t immediately appreciated how biased the sources
were. Parents would bring in a troubled, loud, dramatic, and troublesome child, and after the surgery the child would be much easier to handle. The mental problems had been replaced by docility. So the feedback was positive. One woman reported of her mother’s lobotomy: “She was absolutely violently suicidal beforehand. After the transorbital lobotomy there was nothing. It stopped immediately. It was just peace. I don’t know how to explain it to you; it was like turning a coin over. That quick. So whatever [Dr. Freeman] did, he did something right.”
   As the operation grew in popularity, the age threshold for receiving one went down. The youngest patient to receive the treatment was a twelve-year-old boy named Howard Dully. His stepmother described the behavior that, to her mind, necessitated the operation: “He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says ‘I don’t know.’ He turns the room’s lights on when there is broad sunlight outside.” And under the ice pick he went.

29
See, for example, Kennedy and Grubin, “Hot-headed or impulsive?”, and Stanford and Barratt, “Impulsivity.”

30
See LaConte, et al., “Modulating,” and Chiu, et al., “Real-time fMRI.” Stephen LaConte has been a pioneer in the development of real-time feedback in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and he is the mastermind of this work. Pearl Chiu is an expert in psychology and addiction, and she is spearheading the current experiments to use this technology to cure cigarette smokers of their addiction.

31
Imagine a fantasy world in which we could rehabilitate with 100 percent success. Would that mean that systems of punishment would go away? Not entirely. It could be reasonably argued that punishment would still be necessary for two reasons: deterrence of future criminals and the satisfaction of the natural retributive impulse.

32
Eagleman, “Unsolved mysteries.”

33
Goodenough, “Responsibility and punishment.”

34
Baird and Fugelsang, “The emergence of consequential thought.”

35
Eagleman, “The death penalty.”

36
Greene and Cohen, “For the law.”

37
There are important nuances and subtleties to the arguments presented
in this short chapter, and these are developed at more length elsewhere. For those interested in further detail, please see the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law (
www.neulaw.org
), which brings together neuroscientists, lawyers, ethicists, and policy makers with the goal of building evidence-based social policy. For further reading, see Eagleman, “Neuroscience and the law,” or Eagleman, Correro, and Singh, “Why neuroscience matters.”

38
For more about incentive structuring, see Jones, “Law, evolution, and the brain” or Chorvat and McCabe, “The brain and the law.”

39
Mitchell and Aamodt, “The incidence of child abuse in serial killers.”

40
Eagleman, “Neuroscience and the law.”

  
1
Paul,
Annihilation of Man
.

  
2
Mascall,
The Importance of Being Human
.